Burger King Is Building Artificial Limbs So That Disabled People Can Eat Their Unhealthy BurgersA Meat and Dairy Industries Article from All-Creatures.org

FROM

But all of these pale in comparison to the latest
marketing shtick courtesy of Burger King Argentina: free prosthetic hands to
disabled customers.

Burger King claims to serve more than 11 million guests per day in 91
countries and territories around the world. Photo Credit:
testing/Shutterstockpix

BK's new cholesterol-laden monstrosity is five beef patties layered with
bacon and cheese.

Over the years fast-food outlets have employed a myriad of tactics to
tempt new customers. There have been the classics like McDonald’s Happy Meal
toys, or Subway’s Five Dollar Footlong (R.I.P.). That’s not to mention
cholesterol-filled gimmicks like the chicken-on-chicken monstrosity that was
the KFC Double Down burger and Taco Bell’s answer to breakfast food, the
waffle taco. But all of these pale in comparison to the latest marketing
shtick courtesy of Burger King Argentina: free prosthetic hands to disabled
customers.

You read that correctly. As a way to promote its new Stacker Atomic 5.0
burger last month, branches of the popular fast-food chain across Argentina
*cough* handed out 1,000 prosthetic limbs to customers lacking appendages
who purchased the meals. For this promotion—which formed part of an annual
event nicknamed Stacker Day—Burger King sold the meals at half-price,
donating all of the money from the sales to Atomic Lab, the local startup
responsible for producing the 3-D-printed prosthetics.

“Stacker Day is a big event in Argentina,” Ignacio Ferioli, a member of the
agency responsible for the promotion, told AdWeek. “People queue for hours
to get a burger. Sales keep growing year after year. We wondered if we could
do something relevant that tied back to a huge burger that’s hard to
handle,” Ferioli continued. Cue the clever promotional tie-in.

Ferioli doesn’t lie. The Stacker Atomic 5.0 is so named for the five beef
patties interspersed with bacon and cheese that comprise its making. So yes,
“hard to handle” is definitely one way to describe the burger. Another might
be “nutritional nightmare.” Call it raining on their parade, but it’s hard
not to find fault in a campaign that seeks to improve the lives of people
living with a lost limb (in some cases likely due to type II diabetes),
while pushing a mini mountain of meat and cheese. Irony much?

In Burger King’s defense, the promotion has had a notable impact. As AdWeek
reports, thanks to the sales from Stacker Day, Atomic Lab was able to double
the number of prosthetic limbs it had otherwise been able to donate for free
over the past three years. This just goes to show the power of good
branding, and the tempting prospect of devouring a burger the size of your
head.

But here’s a thought. Burger King could simply stop selling the Stacker
Atomic 5.0 and instead introduce a new, more health-conscious menu item that
could perpetually provide a portion of the profits from its sales to Atomic
Lab. Too idealistic? “People don’t go to Burger King for healthy food”; “It
would cost too much to make.” Maybe these objections are true, but what if
this suggestion actually brought a whole new customer base into the fold,
and in fact didn’t cost as much as one might think?

What if instead of helping out a limited number of people with disabilities,
the fast-food giant used its promotional power actually to create a product
that not only paid lip service to its customer’s health needs, but actually
put its money where our mouths are?

For a company that has built its empire on expanding waistlines and harming
public health, that concept may really be "too hard to handle."

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